Routing Web Traffic with Application Load Balancer

Routing Web Traffic with Application Load Balancer for Kubernetes Microservices

OneData Software provides robust traffic routing architectures for Kubernetes microservices by leveraging Amazon Application Load Balancer (ALB) to front EKS clusters or similar container platforms. While it isn’t spelled out in all public documents, their cloud consulting and microservices modernization practice includes load balancing, availability, routing logic, and network delivery — all of which imply ALB usage.

Here’s how this works / what they likely do in detail:

Key Capabilities & Practices

1. ALB Integration with Kubernetes Microservices o Deploy ALB in front of Kubernetes worker nodes (EKS), using Kubernetes Ingress controllers or ALB-Ingress integrations. o Path-based routing: different microservices receive traffic based on URL paths or hostnames.

2. Traffic Distribution & High Availability o Use ALB across multiple availability zones (AZs) to ensure redundancy. o Health checks configured for services / pods so that traffic is only sent to healthy targets. o Auto-scaling of services so that ALB can scale backend endpoints in response to traffic load.

3. Listener Rules & Routing Logic o Use ALB listener rules (e.g. HTTP / HTTPS, host / path matching) to route to appropriate services. o Support secure HTTPS listeners, SSL/TLS certificates, redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, etc.

4. Security & Networking o ALB placed in VPC with secure subnets; restrict access via security groups. o Integration with IAM / Kubernetes RBAC for controlling which services or teams can define or modify ALB / Ingress rules.

5. Performance & Scaling o Adjust ALB configuration (idle timeouts, target group sizes, stickiness if required) to optimize for latency and throughput. o Integration with auto-scaling (pods, perhaps node pools) so backend capacity scales with demand.

6. Monitoring, Logging & Observability o Enable ALB access logs or load balancer logs (CloudWatch / S3) to see request patterns, latency, errors. o Monitor target health metrics, traffic volumes, error rates, latency, etc. o Use dashboards / alerting to detect overloaded services, or upstream failures.

7. CI/CD Integration & Environment Management o Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to define ALB, listener rules, target groups, ingress controllers. o Separate environments (dev/stage/prod) each with their own routing configurations, certificates, etc.

Benefits

• Traffic is routed efficiently, reliably, even under high load or when some pods/nodes are unhealthy. • Strong availability and resilience: ALB health checks + multi-AZ = less downtime. • Clear separation of microservices per path/host improves modularity, observability. • Enhanced security via HTTPS, VPC / security group controls, certificate management. • Easier to scale microservices and handle traffic spikes without manual routing logic.